In this post, I’m going to show you how you can track your cart abandonment rate using GA.

Let’s get right to it!

Tracking Your Cart Abandonment Rate

In the past, you would have set up goals and funnels to track your rate. It involved choosing a goal type, defining your funnel, and then saving it. This is no longer the case today.

In 2017, Google made things more feasible for ecommerce site owners. Assuming you have already connected GA to your online store, you can track your rate with almost no efforts.

Allow Enhanced eCommerce Tracking

Basic GA account settings don’t include the option to see your cart abandonment rate. You’ll first need to allow enhanced ecommerce tracking, and I’ll show you how to do it.

All you need to do is to go to the ADMIN section of your property. Check the left navigation menu right at the bottom to find the ADMIN link. Click on it to go to the ADMIN area.

This will show you a page with three columns for Account, Property, and View. Ignore the other columns and check the View column, which represents your All Web Site Data.

Under this column, click on Ecommerce Settings, and this will open a new section. Here, click the button to enable ecommerce. After setting the ecommerce option to “ON”, the “Enhanced E-commerce Reporting” will show up. Enable it too and remember to save the settings.

Also, before saving your settings, you have the option to create labels for your checkout-funnel steps. These are optional, but if you decide to create labels, be sure to use terms that are easy to understand.

Then remember to reload or refresh your page and proceed below.

Checking Your Stats

Simply log in to your GA account and check the navigation menu on the left part of your screen. Click Conversions and then Shopping Behavior.

This will open a page that shows the different stages of your customer journey. It will also show you the basket (cart) abandonment figure as well as the checkout abandonment rate.

You can have the cart and checkout abandonment rates display as a single figure. However, it’s advisable to split the two stats to get accurate figures about your website’s performance.

Splitting the two stats allows you to compare them easily because they represent different stages of your customer journey. For example, if the checkout abandonment rate is high than normal, then there might be usability issues with your checkout page.

You can use segments to look at your overall data from different directions. The chart shows you the differences between new and returning visitors. Segments allow you to view data by traffic sources, browser, demographics, regions, and devices.

The purpose of leveraging segments is to understand your customer behavior and profile. This way, it’s possible to know how they use your site and identify some of the pain points they experience through their journey.

Why Track Your Cart Abandonment Rate

You can agree that the stats on cart abandonment are not really good. With a rate of about 70 percent, retailers are losing a lot of customers due to a variety of reasons.

But your rate doesn’t need to be high as the stats show.

Why?

Because your online store, customers, and market are unique. With your Google Analytics data, it’s possible to analyze how your customers are using your website. A detailed analysis will reveal some of the problems they encounter, thus helping you address them.

Tracking your rate will help you identify problems that are unique to your customers. Problems can be product pricing, shipping costs, shipping times, page usability, and others.

You can formulate effective solutions to some of the problems they experience to drop the abandonment rate. Bear in mind that the average value of an online order is $116.58. So, you don’t want to lose potential customers just because of issues you can fix.

Why Customers Adandon Carts

You also need to understand some of the reasons why customers abandon shopping carts. This will help you to address issues early, particularly when setting up your ecommerce store.

The number one reason for cart abandonment is unexpected cost at the checkout page. This happens when a customer picks a product because they think the price is fair. However, they quickly change their mind at the checkout page when the presented cost adds up due to other costs, such as VAT and shipping fees.

Other possible reasons include:

Better price for the same product elsewhere

Website crashes and slow performance

A complicated website navigation

Too many forms during the checkout process

Unsuitable delivery options

Your customers can abandon the cart due to one or several of these reasons. Other reasons could be specific to your store. Instead of guessing these reasons, be sure to use Google Analytics to track your checkout funnel.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate – Final Thoughts

At this point, you understand how you can track your abandonment rate using your GA account. Google has made things easier to allow you to focus on increasing your sales.

If your shopping cart abandonment rate is high, it’s possible to recover it with some help. You can work with car abandonment recover experts and I’m here to help you make the most of your website traffic. Through inbound marketing, I can help you to reduce your abandonment rate and boost your conversations.